This article is a pledge that we actually should care about the differences between what has recently been coined ‘small’ versus ‘big’ stories because they represent very different approaches to narrative inquiry. In the attempt to pull other contributions of this special issue into the debate between small and big, I argue that the small story approach is able to theoretically and methodologically enrich traditional narrative inquiry — not in a peaceful, complementary fashion, but by more radically re-positioning big story approaches as grounded in dialogical/discursive approaches such as small story research.